Cellular automata demonstration

One of the many outputs from the program

The cone snail has an automaton pattern on its shell

Cellular Automata have long attracted attention from researchers
as they provide an excellent example of how a set of very low
intelligence cells, when allowed to interact, can create interesting
emergent results.

This demo is a very simple implementation of Von Neumann's
Cellular Automata experiments, in which each cell is able to look at
the three neighbours above it, giving it 8 possible scenarios in which
it may choose to either switch itself on or off. There are 256
different rule sets possible, based on this simple binary example (
cellular automata experiments have been conducted in far more
complicated n-dimensional spaces), and this Java implementation can
display all of them.

The demo code can be adapted easily to adopt different strategies
and different neighbour interactions to produce different results.

Download Java Cellular Automata Demo

The source code, along with compiled classes, JavaDoc and the
compiled JAR file are available here: